Memories of school are a comfortable old quilt, keeping one warm, but as a patchwork of colors and textures, rather than a seamless, machine-tailored duvet; vignettes and snapshots rather than a feature-length movie. Blame this on the fragility of memory, the inexplicable synaptic stickiness of the most mundane activities, while other arguably more worthy moments are gleefully erased by the fickle memory manager that lords it over one’s cerebrum.
Memories remain, but they are jumbled, incoherent, disjointed…
Like Moral Studies, when we all filed in quietly and somewhat awestruck into Principal Kuruvilla Jacob’s sanctum, once a week, or perhaps less often. As the only air-conditioned room in the school that we had access to, the forays were always welcome, despite the ordeal of having to sit quietly in front of the Supreme Authority for forty minutes, on one’s best behaviour, hoping that one wouldn’t be noticed, listening to his wonderful accent, which I would imitate later to my parents, much to their delight. And chortling in satisfaction when, as would often happen, the session would be interrupted by a phone call that would draw the Supreme Authority out of the room, and entropy and chaos would envelop the restless brood of brats squirming in the rows of chairs that surrounded his huge desk.
Like discussing the memory of teachers’ names with my daughter (who with her brother, comprise the second generation of the family to call themselves Cats, a situation never envisaged when I was galloping down the corridors of the Senior School). And remembering Miss Veronica Lely who was my class teacher in the Junior School, and who became such fast friends with my mother that their friendship continues till today when both are in their eighties and I, their common link, have been out of school for a decade over a quarter of a century. And Mrs Shinde who was my class teacher in the sixth, I think…
Like Mr John Tesseyman, my class teacher in the ninth, an exchange teacher, who scared the daylights out of me in his second session of teaching us English, by not returning my essay on “Myself” while returning those of all my classmates. Had the essay got lost somewhere? Was I going to be penalised for a lost essay that I had certainly written but now seemed to have vanished into limbo? Was there something so terrible in it that he couldn’t bring himself to… teenage terrors ran amok. Instead, he read it out to the class and proceeded with a singularly favourable literary criticism of it, exhorting all to follow my lead, which put a goofy, smug smile on my face for the rest of the day, and reaffirmed my love affair with the English language.
Like Mr. Krishnan, whom I encountered in the tenth and eleventh, and who could, and at the slightest provocation definitely would, recite Shakespeare by the page, declaiming with barely a pause for breath, a fierce gleam in his eye and a proud smile on his lips, as if it were he himself who had penned those masterly lines. Then he would pull himself together and reluctantly return to Thomas Hardy.
Like Mr. Wagh who tried in vain to instill in me a similar infatuation with Hindi, but merely succeeded in imprinting me with a colourful string of barely parliamentary invective, often directed at me, but usually at one or more troublesome classmates. I still use that string occasionally at my son, though it has no effect on him.
Like Mr. Nanabhoy Davar, who would tramp across from the eponymous Davar’s College and teach us Accountancy with such a sure hand that six years later I sailed through my Chartered Accountancy and Management Accountancy exams armed with nothing more than the three basic rules of accounting he so effortlessly taught us.
Like Mrs Bhesania, who had the unenviable twin tasks of stepping into Mr Davar’s large shoes and coping with an unruly bunch of us, most of whom towered over her and were not shy of marching up to the blackboard and correcting a balance sheet that hadn’t tallied.
Like Mr Rao, whose copperplate handwriting on the blackboard caused smartly arrayed algebraic equations to march off the blackboard and successfully into my brain.
Like Mr Patki, whom I remember for his neat, precise and colourful chalk work of the inner secrets of pistils and stamens and his oft-repeated threat of “Ehh, I have pink card!”
Like Mr Newton, who once administered a swift blow of his cane on my palm for some now-forgotten infraction and then apologised to my mother for having had to do so.
Like Mr. Friendsmith (I’m sure that’s the name I recall) who would rap us on the head with the blackboard duster, and when called to task for doing so, substituted the duster with his stout cherrywood pipe.
Like hours spent in the library, finger-walking the shelves in search of elusive Alistair Macleans, Agatha Christies and P.G. Wodehouses.
Like drinking on a hot afternoon from the cold water fountain installed in the south west corner of the quad without the benefit of bottle, mug or glass.
Like shooting hoops aimlessly in the upstairs gym after school in a successful attempt to avoid any more strenuous activity during house games.
Like prowling the deserted corridors of the school late at night or on a weekend, exploring forbidden corners, courtesy of a firm friendship with Mr Newton’s son and therefore many a visit to his flat tucked away on the top floor of the Senior School.
Like sessions of kitty-kitty-I’m-a-coming, a harebrained pointless game of team leapfrog (too complex to explain, even if I remembered the rules) or kings aka dhaaba-dhoobi (props for the name!), a just-as-pointless game of team chuck-the-ball-at-the-other-
Like the SLR - the Science Lecture Room, with its tiered seating like something out of The Paper Chase, sadly restricted access to us Commerce students.
Like the spiral staircase that led down from the SLR to the Quad.
Like bounding up the steps of the magnificent Senior School staircase, many times a day.
And now I huff and puff and have to stop at each landing to recover when asked to trudge up to the AV room for a presentation to the parents.
Let it rip, let it thunder. But I need to catch my breath first.
Nice - you truly took me back to school.
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